This paper took a closer look at Renaissance drinking vessels and drinking culture and examined the types of vessels commonly used in Italy and the Netherlands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

This paper argues that, from about the eleventh century CE, a new and distinctive model of corruption accompanied the rediscovery and increased availability of a number of classical texts and ideals, particularly those of Cicero and the Roman Jurists.

The name Machiavelli has negative connotations, and this way of thinking is not new. Throughout Europe, in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, Machiavellianism was associated with unscrupulous abuse of power, and Machiavellian methods were seen as immoral and evil.

In this essay, classical rhetorical theory is applied to show that Machiavelli’s Prince was not intended as advice for a prince, nor as “political science,” but rather as a very subtle, but nevertheless powerful, critique of the Italian princes of his day, the Medici included.

My primary point is not to vindicate Christian education as good for the well-being of cities but to complicate the assumptions of the civil religion approach by examining Machiavelli’s reflections on human character and psychology.

Such an approach has not always been the obvious one, as the centuries- long debate about the nature of the Italian noble (or magnate) and Popolo fac- tions suggests. Gaetano Salvemini’s 1899 interpretation of Florentine political conflict in the thirteenth century as the clash between two groups with distinct socio-economic characters and political programmes was probably as much indebted to Machiavelli as to the author’s socialist beliefs

Medieval Warfare

Read about the rise and fall of the Assassins in the latest issue of Medieval Warfare. Click here to order the magazine.

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